A saber and a fireballOn dangerous Iwo Jima, Army officer battled
Japanese on a beach and outside a cave.

By David VendittaOf The Morning Call

This is the second of two articles marking
the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima, a costly but key U.S. victory
in the march toward Tokyo.

Scanning the beach for footprints, 2nd Lt.
James J. Ahern couldn't hear the shouts of alarm from his men atop a cliff
as a barefoot, shirtless Japanese soldier clutching a saber charged at
him across the sand.

A brisk April wind blew in from the Pacific,
muffling the frantic calls. The sun shone, but it was cool enough in this
rocky, northernmost section of Iwo Jima that Ahern wore his field jacket.
He had told the men of his Army platoon that he would check the beach alone.
But the wet sand was smooth, revealing no telltale signs of the enemy.

At the water's edge, he turned toward a cave
in the rock face 150 feet away and saw the Japanese man racing toward him,
both hands gripping the hilt of his saber.

Though surprised, Ahern reacted coolly. He
had time to get off a shot with his carbine. He raised the rifle to his
shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

His heart pounding, he pulled back the bolt.
A live round ejected from the chamber. He had ammunition. Why wouldn't
the gun fire?

The safety was on!

He'd always kept it off. It was a rule the
23-year-old officer followed and that he impressed on the men. In combat,
you have to expect the unexpected. You have to be ready to shoot at a moment's
notice, or it could mean your life.

The Japanese was almost upon him, poised to
swing his saber. Precious seconds had passed.

A fireball on a ledge

Ahern had faced death before on this tiny island,
where he was leading a rifle platoon of the 147th Infantry Regiment.

The Marines had landed on Feb. 19, 1945. Ahern's
unit arrived on March 21 to help secure the island from what initially
were thought to be a few hundred Japanese.

But there were far more than that, hiding in
tunnels and caves, and their resistance proved intense. In two months,
Ahern's regiment alone would kill 1,600 and capture 800.

Danger was everywhere. One day in mid-April,
a few weeks before the sword-carrying man came at him on the beach near
Kitano Point, Ahern was firing a flamethrower into a cave from a ledge
on a steep ravine.

A Japanese soldier inside tossed a concussion
grenade that landed at Ahern's feet. When it exploded, the blast knocked
him off-balance, jerking him around so that the stream of flame shifted
from the mouth of the cave to the rock wall beside it.

The terrific force of the flame striking the
wall created a fireball that whooshed back at Ahern and set his legs and
chest ablaze. He tumbled headfirst down the slope, his back and arms slamming
into rock, and landed on a ledge 20 feet below on his head and back. His
helmet and the flamethrower still strapped on him blunted the impact.

He was hurt, in shock and still burning. Some
of his men clambered down the precipice to reach him. They beat out the
fire with their hands and splashed water onto him from their canteens.
Using a poncho as a stretcher, they carried him to the battalion surgeon's
tent. The burns blistered, keeping him out of action for a week.

Now on the beach, backed up to the ocean's
edge so that water covered his shoes, with the safety preventing his carbine
from firing, Ahern had to save himself.

The Japanese reached him and swung his saber
like a baseball bat.

Ahern pressed his thumb to the button beside
the trigger, disengaging the safety, and pulled the trigger just as the
saber's blade swept in an arc below his raised gun, toward his stomach.
This time the carbine fired, sending a .30-caliber bullet into the attacker's
chest.

Ahern's field pack got in the way when he searched
small caves, so he wasn't wearing one. Instead, he carried his food, a
carton of K rations, tucked inside the front of his field jacket, above
his pistol belt. The carton — 10 inches long, 4 inches wide and 2 inches
thick — held biscuits, cheese, cigarettes, powdered coffee and milk.

When the Japanese got hit, the tip of his saber
ripped Ahern's jacket and sliced through the box of rations, opening a
can. The man fell dead.

Ahern was unscathed. He felt queasy at how
close he had come to losing his life.

His men, who had witnessed the attack from
atop the 200-foot cliff, congratulated him for the kill. He'd had a pact
with them to raffle off any sabers they took as booty, and no man could
get more than one. But the platoon members said there'd be no lottery for
this prize. Their lieutenant should keep the sword. He'd earned it.

They did, however, kid him for not having his
carbine ready to fire. He never could explain why he'd had the safety on.

Safe haven for B-29s

By the time he arrived on Iwo Jima, Ahern had
been familiar with weapons and the military for seven years, since before
America entered World War II.

The youngest of eight children born to a Philadelphia
policeman and a former knitting mill worker, he joined the Pennsylvania
National Guard when he was 16, too young to do so legally, using an older
brother's identity. His father had died when he was a child, and the $3
a month he earned drilling with a cavalry regiment helped support his poor
family.

He graduated from St. Thomas More High School
in Philadelphia, left the Guard and worked at a clothmaker and at the Navy
Yard as an apprentice toolmaker.

In 1942, with the nation at war, he joined
the Army. High test scores sent the 6-foot, 170-pounder to Officer Candidates
School, where he earned a commission as a second lieutenant of infantry.

Shipping out as a replacement, he joined Company
F of the 147th Regiment on what was then British Samoa, now Upolu. More
than a year later, his unit landed on Iwo Jima under the command of the
3rd Marine Division. Its mission was to roust the Japanese so that damaged
B-29 bombers could land there safely.

The island reeked of sulfur and the waste produced
by tens of thousands of men. Swarming blowflies blackened mess kits as
soon as they were opened. Malaria, dengue fever and a fungus-produced rash
called ''jungle rot'' plagued Ahern and many others.

Soft, black volcanic ash made walking difficult,
so Ahern sometimes used his carbine as a crutch to keep his balance. For
cover, the men piled up rocks and hunkered down behind them. Mines with
hidden trip wires maimed and killed.

A 'suicide' survivor

One of Ahern's experiences on Iwo Jima was
so unusual, it turned up in a newspaper article and, decades later, in
a Japanese officer's memoirs.

On the last day of March 1945, Ahern took his
platoon on patrol near rocky Kitano Point. Walking along a cliff, he looked
down a ravine and saw a cave with two Japanese officers standing on each
side of its opening.

An interpreter with Ahern yelled at the officers
to surrender or they would be killed. They ignored him. But one soldier
did come out of the cave with his hands up. Enraged at his cowardice, each
of the two officers threw a grenade at him. Fragments from the explosions
almost severed his feet, but he was still alive.

Ahern promptly shot both officers in the head,
killing them, then had his radioman call for the battalion surgeon. Four
men climbed down the cliff to the wounded Japanese. They put tourniquets
on his mangled feet and carried him on a poncho up to Ahern's narrow ledge.

The man screamed in agony. Ahern gave him a
few jabs of morphine.

Capt. Ralph ''Doc'' Golden arrived, looked
at the Japanese and said, ''Oh boy, this is really a textbook case.'' He
sedated the man, reached inside his canvas bag and pulled out a fine steel
surgical saw that had been taken from a cave the Japanese used as a hospital.

A cigarette dangled from Golden's mouth as
he worked. ''The ashes are sterile,'' he explained. ''They won't hurt anything.''
With Ahern holding one leg and a private holding the other, the doctor
sawed off what was left of the man's feet. An ambulance took him to a field
hospital near Mount Suribachi.

In the mid-1990s, while visiting the University
of Hawaii library, Ahern found an article about the incident in a 1945
issue of the Mid-pacifican, an Army newspaper. It was headlined, ''Iwo
Jap Saved By Army Medic and Sharp Saw.'' The story contained no names.

More revealing was a Japanese officer's account.
A former U.S. intelligence officer Ahern had met on Iwo Jima gave him an
English translation of the memoirs of 2nd Lt. Yasuhiko Murai, a general's
son who had been wounded and captured on the island in April 1945.

In his story, which came to light in the mid-1980s,
Murai said that when he was in the field hospital near Suribachi, he saw
someone he knew from his infantry battalion — Paymaster Sgt. Hayashida,
who was about 35 and had lost both feet above the ankle.

The two Japanese met again at a U.S. Army prisoner-of-war
compound in Hawaii. Hayashida had been fitted with prostheses. ''You know
that the Japanese would never do the same for a U.S. soldier,'' the amputee
said.

Murai wrote that the paymaster had survived
a suicide attempt. Hayashida had explained that when Americans discovered
him and the officers at a cave, a lieutenant standing with him exploded
a grenade, killing himself but not Hayashida.

So Hayashida had convinced Murai that he expected
to die in the grenade blast with the lieutenant. That twisting of the truth
allowed him to save face among his countrymen. In the Japanese military
mindset, surrender was the ultimate shame and dishonor.

Hayashida lived to be an old man with his American-made
''feet.'' He died in Japan in 1985.

Mourning a good soldier

After two months on Iwo Jima, now 1st Lt. Ahern
was among officers from the 147th Regiment flown to Okinawa for still more
fighting.

He was injured again, this time by grenade
fragments in his back, and suffered a recurrence of malaria and dengue
fever. The diseases were so debilitating, he could hardly walk after the
battle was over. He spent months in hospitals on Saipan and in Hawaii and
California.

Back in Philadelphia in the spring of 1946,
three weeks after he was relieved from active duty, he married Mary Eells.

He had met her in 1943 while home on leave
after getting his commission. She worked with one of his sisters in an
insurance office. When he was overseas, he always looked forward to her
upbeat, newsy letters.

The couple had two sons and a daughter. They
moved to Emmaus in 1953 and to Bethlehem a year later, with Ahern working
for an insurance company and later running a small book publishing company.
He and his wife also owned a Catholic bookstore on New Street.

A reservist, Ahern retired from the Army as
a lieutenant colonel in 1981.

He is 83 now, but Iwo Jima is still with him.
He writes about his regiment, researches the battle and organizes his records,
photos and correspondence. His son in California has the saber that almost
slashed his stomach. His other son, in Montgomery County, has a ''rising
sun'' flag Ahern took from a Japanese soldier he killed.

But there also are the memories in his heart.
One is of Ernst Lippold, a private in his company who was Jewish and in
his early 20s. He was quiet, polite and unassuming. He didn't complain.
He was a good soldier.

Ahern wondered why Lippold never got any mail
or wrote any letters. He spoke with him and learned that he was Austrian.
About the time Nazi Germany annexed his homeland, he came to America to
study. After Pearl Harbor, he was subject to the draft even though he wasn't
a U.S. citizen, and so he entered the Army.

Lippold believed that the Nazis had killed
the family he left behind in Austria, that he alone survived. He had no
one.

Ahern liked him and became his friend. But
he couldn't grant Lippold's request for a transfer to Europe, where he
could search for his relatives. That just wasn't possible.

One day in April 1945, Ahern asked for a volunteer
to check out a report of a possible mine, and Lippold said, ''I'll go.''
Walking down a small trail, he tripped the wire on a ''bouncing Betty''
mine, which flew up and detonated. He was mortally wounded and died soon
afterward at a battalion aid station.

Ahern had heard the explosion and knew what
it meant. Tears filled his eyes. He accompanied the body to the cemetery
near Mount Suribachi, where a Catholic chaplain prayed in Hebrew as two
Marines lowered Lippold's sack-enclosed body into the ground.

The Army had no one to contact with the news
about Lippold. His death on a stinking piece of rock in the Pacific, unmourned
by a family that had probably perished in the Holocaust, weighed on Ahern
for many years. He tried to find out if anyone had ever claimed the body.

No one had. But it was disinterred and reburied
in 1950 in Arlington National Cemetery, America's most hallowed ground.

At least there was that.

''I think often of this quiet man, this good
soldier who gave his life for all Americans,'' Ahern once wrote to friends.
''May God have mercy on his soul.''
LIPPOLD, ERNEST L JRPVT US AGFBURIED AT: SECTION 34 SITE 4264ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY
Posted: 19 March 2005